


The Words We Do Not Say

by drneroisgod



Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Angst, Gen, I DID THAT ON PURPOSE, Lucy is Dead, Max Nero POV, Raven POV, The Only Woman He Ever Loved, Timeline: Zero Hour, i do not make any claims as to who she might be, or whoever it is, she is also there, the point is that nero definitely feels guilty about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:01:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25160539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drneroisgod/pseuds/drneroisgod
Summary: After the events of Zero Hour, Dr. Nero and Raven are both facing severe physical and emotional injuries. As Raven recovers from her animus infection, Nero handles the aftermath of a hemorrhage due to being impaled (???? IDK this is all canon so like you know what I'm trying to say). As they are both left with their own thoughts, they both try to reconcile their relationship with some hard truths.Raven's chapter takes place the night after they drop off all those dignitaries in the middle of nowhere. Nero's chapter takes place the day after he dissolves the council.
Relationships: Diabolus Darkdoom & Natalya | Raven, Natalya | Raven & Maximilian Nero
Comments: 6
Kudos: 11





	1. Chapter 1

We are not home yet. 

It is nighttime, now, and from my hospital window I can see headlights wicking down the front range. Their drivers would be dead, I think, had Overlord’s plan succeeded. 

Diabolus taps a knuckle on my doorframe. He looks tired. “Max is out of surgery,” he says quietly. “Stable condition. I thought you should know.”

He does not make any promises about the possibility of if, or when, he’ll wake up. But in our business, those sorts of promises are often as not an unkindness. Diabolus has always been kind to me.

“How are the students?” I ask. 

“The Professor and I are trying to play grief counselor for them,” Diabolus sighs. “Otto’s pretty torn up about it, and Laura. But they have each other.”

I nod. 

“What about you?” Diabolus leans against the doorframe, and I wish he wouldn’t. 

“They say I’ll live,” I tell him. 

“Yeah,” he sighs, but his mind is somewhere else. “They told me that too.”

I do not sleep. Chills run the length of my body, and I cannot lay under the covers for more than five minutes before becoming too hot—but without them I’m freezing. They tried to get me to eat, but I can only manage water. My head pounds. I am exhausted, and I do not sleep. 

To my knowledge, Otto and I are the only survivors of animus. To my knowledge, animus was not meant to be survivable. That would have been the appeal for Furan—he could maintain my body for years, if he pleased, and even if he called it Raven, he could be satisfied that Natalya was dead, just like he always wanted.

I vomit water into a plastic tub when my stomach starts to heave. I have survived the snow. I plan to survive this.

But I am not at home yet.

Furan is dead. I think I should feel something, but I have other things to torment me right now. He’s dead dead dead dead. Deaddead. But this is small comfort. His death does not mean that someone else will live. 

I sip water and it tastes like blood. 

I spend days or minutes, possibly hours, flipping my bedclothes off and on. I shiver and start; I heave and I tremble. I am exhausted and see visions of shadows moving through my room, though I do not sleep. A live wire runs through my brain, reminding me that I am supposed to be working, lifting my arms and slashing my swords and agreeing to things I didn’t think about. They say you can sleep when you are dead. I don’t think that’s true.

I think if I sleep I will remember what I did to my friend because I was not strong enough to stop it. To my knowledge, I am forgiven.

It’s not enough. 

I cannot be here. Not in this room, not with these shadows, not with the rumble of the highway or the taste of iron in my mouth. My head hurts and I am standing. I pull the comforter from the bed and wrap it around my shoulders, and I take my IV with me to stalk the halls. 

It is an empty, gray place. I think I am about to throw up and I stop, but it passes and I start. I don’t have shoes. I’m hotcold. When I pass the nurses, they don’t bother me. Perhaps they’ve heard of me. I hope so. I am a ghost in my own body and it’s itchy to be here. There are so many empty hospital rooms with pictures of flowers that look like they are supposed to be painted, but they are from a computer. But it’s still dark and we are above the level of the streetlights. I can see the blossoms on the wall yet they have no color for me. 

I don’t have shoes. There is a purpleblue bruise on my ankle, which I think I remember getting. Possibly, I do not. I think I am about to throw up and I stop, and it passes but I start. I think I am doing worse now than I did after Wing jabbed me. Even snow shows mercy. My cape is a blanket and I stalk the halls; I don’t think I am myself and yet it is also true that this is the only time I’ve been myself in a fortnight. I am myself and it is itchy to be here. Am I home yet? I am hot and cold because I have a fever, which, if I remember correctly, Otto did not have when they rescued him from his months of captivity in his own mind. He just had brain damage, which is not a fever. But then, Otto has always had a different kind of strong than me. 

This is the thing I am not thinking about: “Wait.” 

And also: “You should have killed me when you had the chance.”

And also: “It wasn’t you.”

Someone always wanted me to survive. 

When I find him he is asleep. Then, I am asleep too. We are not home yet.

When I wake up, the light is the dusty gray of pre-dawn. I still feel hotcold but I am not as afraid as I was in the darkness. 

Max is asleep. His chest rises and falls beneath the generic hospital blankets. Even in G.L.O.V.E. facilities, hospitals are hospitals—and I hate hospitals. 

I fell asleep on a couch at the foot of his bed. I move to a chair next to him, where I can watch him better. This is unusual for us. Max has always been a man in a cold war against the world—his art of villainy is about threats and subtle imbalances of power, taking what you want and then throwing it away. In my more frustrated moments with him, I suspect Max teases Diabolus about his gadgets so much because somewhere inside he knows that he will never amount to much more than an academic in the grand scheme of things. Until now, I’ve always imagined him dying in bed with an unfinished glass of brandy in his hand. 

Max’s window faces west, so I see the radiance of the sun as it hits the rocky crags of the foothills and the blinding sheen hitting a distant lake. 

This has always been a possibility. I have killed too many people to think of Max as a person without a carotid artery. But I don’t know what I will do without him. 

I sit in the quiet, preoccupied with my weakness and his. I am thirsty, so I drink the water that was obviously set out for him. I nap, or I think I do. I glare at the nurses who look at us and refuse to speak to them, and when they are gone I keep my face turned away from the window. 

I do feel sick.

But.

I am awake when Max stirs. I do not call for the nurses. I do not know how. Instead I rest my chin on my knee and hope that this is a good sign, that he might live. Max looks around, blearily at first, but he turns his head and smiles at me before he has the chance to study what he sees. 

With effort, he says, “You’ve been crying.”

“No, I haven’t,” I tell him. 

“Are you all right?” he asks, and I think that I should not be here. He is just a few minutes out of a daze and already, he worries about me.

“I picked up a few bugs while I was infected with animus,” I say, doing my very best to not sound miserable, and failing. I say what I say when I am sad: “I’ll live.”

“Natalya,” he says, and I can tell he is about to try consoling me.

“Don’t,” I say. “I should go. You should rest.”

Max says, “Stay with me.”

I hide my face again. I am very bad at this. I am supposed to be stronger than this.

“Come here,” he beckons, and I move my chair until it is flush with the mattress. He reaches for me and cups my face in his hand, again. And for a moment, I am in that dark basement, finding my sword buried in his belly, again. I flinch, but he does not.

I sob, because the three words I want to say are the three words we do not say to each other. We are unattached. I am neither his mother, nor his lover, nor his daughter. He and I, we are not prone to sentiment. I am his bodyguard and he is my employer, and there’s nothing more to it.

I sob, because that is not true. 

Max lets me sprawl crossways on his bed, so that my knees remain curled on my chair but my head rests in his lap. He strokes my hair as though he’s done it hundreds of times. 

“This isn’t even the worst thing that’s ever happened to us,” I weep.

“Go to sleep, Natalya,” he tells me. “We’ll talk about it at home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There was like, no good way to say this in writing, but the reason Raven is so sick here (she has a stomach flu and idk a yeast infection? lol) is because, to my way of thinking, while they were able to make a version of animus that a human body wouldn't reject (and, therefore, die), the animus would still have to suppress its host's immune system to keep functioning. Even though Raven was only infected with animus for a relatively short time, I decided that it would be fun if she had these infections that were getting stronger (but which were being symptomatically repressed) the whole time she was under the influence of animus, and so while she was able-bodied and aware immediately after being cured, within a few hours she'd be sick as a dog.
> 
> Is that medically accurate? Don't know, don't care.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With my apologies to Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, William Shakespeare, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Victor Hugo, from whom I stole various conceptions of love because it is the best love Nero knows when he's sick.

Because I cannot hold a hard conversation, we are having a sad one instead. Natalya has me settled on the settee in my sitting room, where she is musing several things aloud.

“I know she had quite the estate. I wonder who it’s going to.” Except for a red scratch on her forehead, she has recovered from our last mission and buzzes with life as she tidies my mess for me. I envy her energy. “But then, it was a legal title, was it not? There has to be someone next in line, or else the state will reclaim it. Or is that wrong?”

“G.L.O.V.E. will clean the particulars out before the Italian government has its way with the estate,” I tell her. “There’s a team assigned already.”

“Hm,” Natalya says, “It’s a pity, even so.”

She’s not wrong. The deaths of my students are always difficult to take, but this one was particularly gruesome. 

Natalya is now investigating the contents of my cupboards. “We still have some of the Contessa’s things in storage. They were supposed to go to Lucy, but I wonder if her friends might like them to remember her by.”

“Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living,” I quote, watching her. 

“What?” she calls, not really listening. When I don’t respond immediately, she says, “I’m going to pick up our dinner. Keep still while I’m gone!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I mutter sarcastically, but this she hears and I am rewarded with a stern look before my friend sweeps out the door with her head held high. 

My recovery is not going as smoothly as planned. All I have to do is collapse in my own office and I see a man’s life is a tedious one—without ceremony I am hoisted onto a gurney and lugged to a hospital bed where I am duly inspected before being lectured by my chief medical officer, who prescribes something for the pain. 

My head is spinning and I am not much up to reading the bottle to find out what it is. It doesn’t matter. Natalya knows what he gave me.

She has elected herself my nurse and mother after the afternoon’s events, and so I remain settled on the settee at her instruction. I have a stack of books, which I am too dizzy to read, and a notepad of sudokus, which I am too dizzy to play, and the remote to my TV, which I do not watch on principle. 

I know I should talk to her. 

The animus infection scared her, more than anything has in some time. She is different. She is both more vibrant and more reserved; she lusts for life and yet I can tell something has been keeping her awake at night. Perhaps it’s too soon. 

She watches me like a hawk. Somehow, I am surprised, as though her concern is extraordinary conduct when it is what I have been paying her to do all these years. It depends. I have no memory of her using hairpins or a curling-tongs, but I remember her silver scissors and short, black hair getting shorter. Coveted combat boots she ended up outgrowing. The too-much mascara phase. I’m sure I still have her terrible mixtapes in a storage room downstairs somewhere. Where did the time go? In a little over a year, she will have known me longer than she has not. 

I know I should talk to her. 

I shift in my seat a little and wince. My thoughts distract me from my pain and my pain distracts me from my thoughts. I do not know which is the worse. Perhaps I am a little theatric. All said, it isn’t a large scar that I am healing, and I think there are others who have been cut more willingly with better results. But, as with the first time, Natalya found herself delivered, and that’s what matters.

The things we do for the families we get. 

Pietor Furan is dead. She’s handled it better this time. With the sister, she was a wreck for weeks (I can say this to you out loud because she isn’t back with our food yet). Even after taking her tormentor’s life into her own hands, her nightmares kept her reeling for days at a time and she’d arrive at breakfast with red eyes, like the very devil. It was some time before she was quite her pleasant self again. Or, perhaps, for the first time. 

Of course, I know something of that myself.

Dark nights, empty bottles. Sirens weeping against the pavement and spots, spots, spots. 

_It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn_ , said she, waving a book under my nose.

I remember the yellow light. I remember the sound of heels on linoleum tiles. I have never again met a lemon cake to parallel her recipe. You could see the ocean from her window, though I know you weren’t there to see it. Things like key rings and hair clips, unmended sweaters and alarm clocks were left on counters out of careless habit—but it was her house. What was I going to say?

In some ways I will always be the man I was in that moment, trapped between the question and answer. Air in my lungs but no longer able to breathe, a word on my lips but no longer able to speak, tears in my eyes but no longer able to grieve. It numbed me. As I stood there contemplating her things, it seemed perfectly clear why hearts should stop and yet clocks should keep on ticking.

So, as I force myself to sit up and then find myself choking on the stars in my eyes, you can understand why I am not afraid. This has happened before because I am alone. How can you build on such a quicksand?

I should be so lucky to only remember terrible things. 

Idly, I think of my father—I have not known him for as long as I have known Natalya, down to the very day. I wonder if she remembers when she was the one recovering in bed, and I read to her. (I got that idea from him.) She looked us more like a thing made of malice than of duty, but still we read, and read, and read. My wild, wicked slip of an assassin. Where she burns bright, there is my world, worthy to inlay the heavens with stars.

She deserves more, I fear, than to burn in ignorance. Someday she will have to know the truth. But what will I do without her?

Natalya comes up behind me. “Who are you talking to?”

“You,” I say, because I am tired and for all that thinking, I am still not ready to introduce her to all my ghosts. 

She smiles a little, and I remember how round her face was before she hit her last growth spurt. I am trying to forget my pain even as I am speared on its prongs. 

Did you know, I told Diabolus he was being too poetic yesterday?

“Dinner’s hot and ready to eat, if you’re ready,” she tells me. 

Because I am not ready to have sad conversation, I choose a hard one. 

“Natalya.”

“What is it?” she asks, perching on a cushion. There is deep concern in her eyes. 

“When you were infected,” I say, and she is frowning, “I didn’t know you were still there. I was going to kill you.”

“You had no idea if I could be cured,” she says. She scratches her wrist, where a dead animus deposit is still visible through her skin. “Neither did I. It was a hard call. Why dwell on it?”

“Because you don’t have to stay,” I whisper.

Her face is stone. “Excuse me?”

We stare at each other in silence for one beat. Two beats. Three.

“Is this really a life you chose?” I ask. “Perhaps you should go. Explore the world. You are entitled to your own best interests.”

Natalya bares her teeth and her eyes blaze. She leans in very close. “You tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” she returns, “but Max, you do not tell me. Why are you doing this?”

I could tell her, but instead, I am silent. She looks at me helplessly, not sure if I am doubting her character or my own. When I offer no further explanation, she stands to plate our food. With perfect calm, she serves me a bowl of soup, then sprawls in my armchair and, like harmless lightning, throws her eyes back to me. I shiver, but I do not have a fever. Of all the things I have not told Natalya, there are only one or two, I think, for which she will not forgive me in the end.

“I ran into someone interesting on our way back,” she tells me. “I forgot to tell you.”

“Oh?”

“It’s another assassin I knew back in the day—”

“Naturally.”

“—and she was in Denver because—” And then she is off describing an adventure for which I was not present, and a mystery I am not fully able to follow. But she smiles as she tells it and, I think, she is happy.

We must be for ourselves in the long run. I don’t know if I have the strength for that—there are words we do not say to each other: words that would not protect us, words that would leave us vulnerable. We needed a book to learn we could trust each other, chapter and verse. But the more I am lost in words, the more I wonder, am I really doing right by her? I do not know what will come of us when she knows. I know she has no need of me; she has no sun in her sky for she is the sun itself. Natalya is absolutely without pity. When she goes, she will go for good. But until then she is my deepest consolation and my nurse, besides. We are laughing. In the absence of my story, I am content to listen to hers instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it a little dramatic to have Raven aggressively quote Dickens at her dad to end an argument? Maybe so. But it's my fic so we can quote Dickens as much as we like!!!


End file.
